Designing for Equity in Next Gen Learning

Where Do Equity and Race Enter the Conversation on Innovation?

We collected tools that next generation educators have used to develop an equity lens in professional learning, organizational growth, school culture, and next gen learning design. Use them to create a new narrative in your schools: to actively and thoughtfully design for equity.

Where do equity and race enter the conversation on innovation? How can we design and teach for equity?

This toolkit offers tools and methods for tapping equity’s inventive potential for new school designs. Reflect on inspired and passionate practices of teachers and leaders emerging from the NGLC Regional Funds for Breakthrough Schools, seven organizations engaged in nurturing local learning ecosystems. Each of these learning ecosystems prioritizes educator-led change. They invest and engage in communities of practice that share a next gen mindset and equity lens.

By supporting next gen school designs and professional learning communities, the seven NGLC regional partners and the educators they work with are doing the reimagining and reinvention work necessary to enable what the National Equity Project defines as educational equity: "that each child receives what he or she needs to develop to his or her full academic and social potential."

This toolkit is intended to provide support and inspiration to anyone who is motivated and ready to make conversations about equitable learning more transparent, meaningful, and transformative.

The Tools

This toolkit contains five different types of tools. Some were developed by NGLC regional partners and others are nationally-produced resources used by the regional partners to nurture and support equity within next gen learning design. Each section of the toolkit provides links to each tool, offers a description of how they support equity in next gen learning design, and explains how and why they are used by NGLC regional partners. We provide this context of local needs and conditions because of their influence on the development and use of each tool. Although we provide recommendations for using the tools, we encourage you to consider how your conditions, student population, and historical context are similar and different from the tools' creators.

Engage With Us

We offer several opportunities for engaging in conversation with equity-minded, next gen educators.

2. Innovation with an Open Heart Workshop Agenda. At the 2016 iNACOL Symposium, Caroline Hill, Maggie Runyan-Shefa, Stacey Wang, Finessa Ferrell, Sarah Luchs, and Kristen Vogt introduced a group of educators to some of the tools in this toolkit using an agenda that you may want to emulate. We recommend allotting much more time than the two hours we had, yet the steps represented by the agenda are purposeful: 1. Build community and trust with low-risk and joyful activities. 2. Explore individual social identities as sources of both pride and pain to better know each other. 3. Examine systemic oppression and the role of discourse. 4. Engage in design sessions, whether at the student, school, or system level, to reinvent a new, equitable system of learning.

4. #NGLCchat - Equity. NGLC regional partners and other educators who embrace #innovation and #edequity joined two #NGLCchat sessions to engage with each other around issues of equity. See the recap from October 2016 and November 2016. (Update: Storify summaries are no longer available.)